An outcry among the community has pressured Twitch to tighten its rules after one of its streamers came clean about scamming friends and viewers to fuel a gambling addiction.
Twitch is the biggest live-streaming platform in the world, where tens of millions of people tune in daily to watch ‘streamers’ for hours a day. These streamers are individuals who broadcast a wide variety of live content to audiences around the world.
Twitch began as a place to stream people playing video games and interacting with their audience (who can send messages in a live public chat). While games as a whole still make up the majority of the viewership, the most popular single category is now ‘Just Chatting’, which is a general catch all for non-gaming content.
People successfully live-stream all kinds of activities, from cooking, to ‘just chatting’ with their viewers, to making music – and sometimes any of the above while also being in a bikini in an inflatable pool. But that’s a whole different discussion.
The past two years have seen a rise in streams focusing on various kinds of gambling – like sports betting, poker, and even chess betting. It seems that the thrill and excitement of gambling are a perfect match for the vicarious entertainment that live-streaming is built on.
The most popular of these are online slots, which are now in the top 10 most popular categories on the site, attracting about 50 000 people a day to watch over a million hours of gambling daily.
This has unsurprisingly been the subject of much community discussion and media attention regarding exposing people to gambling, especially younger viewers who are not restricted from watching these streams.
Aside from simple exposure, many of these streamers are sponsored by the websites they gamble on, with clear incentives and rewards for getting their viewers to sign up.
Sponsorship also creates an illusion about the risks of gambling. Online gambling sites can easily sponsor streamers with huge sums of money as so much of it is paid straight back to them via bets.
Top streamers are being paid millions of dollars a month to stream themselves playing slots for hours a day – normalising reckless betting with little risk to their own wallets.
Top content creators on the platform threatened to strike after a scandal where lesser-known streamer ‘ItsSliker’ revealed the extent of his gambling addiction. He had been asking money from fans as well as borrowing money from other streamers (which was never paid back) to fund his gambling habits.
Twitch’s biggest star, Felix ‘xQc’ Lengyel, who has 11 million followers and averages over 60 000 viewers at any given time, announced he would quit gambling streams in June last year.
He stated that this followed concerns about his own worsening addictive behaviour and seeing how many of his own viewers had signed up to gambling sites.
After a backlash from the community and threats from top streamers, Twitch announced this week that it would be banning “slots, roulette, or dice games that aren’t licensed in the US or other markets with robust consumer protections”.
This partial ban affects some of the most popular and highest-grossing slot sites used by streamers, such as Stake.com.
However, it will still allow any games licensed in the US and similar countries, as well as ”websites that focus on sports betting, fantasy sports, and poker”.
IOL Tech